Peter Quanz

PETER QUANZ

Peter Quanz, of Baden, Ontario, knew he wanted to be a choreographer at age nine. In his first year at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School, he was given the opportunity to choreograph for dancers from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet Company. By clearly defining his need to choreograph at a young age, Peter chose to pursue his creative development and education rather than follow a dancer's traditional career. He performed with the Stuttgart Ballet and has been a free-lance choreographer since 2002.

Peter has choreographed for dance companies, opera, and theatre, and has created ballets for some of the world's leading ballet companies. He has had commissions from the Mariinsky Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, the Royal Ballet (Linbury Theatre), Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Hong Kong Ballet, the National Ballet of Cuba, and the National Ballet of Canada. He created In Tandem for Works & Process at the Guggenheim.

Peter founded Q DANCE in 2010 to provide an opportunity to collaborate with a chamber group of exceptionally talented artists and to allow him to create his own programs. The company has close associations with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and had a Joyce Theatre season in 2012 in New York City.

Peter Quanz has been awarded the prestigious State Medal in Literature and the Arts by President Vyacheslav Nagovitsyn of the Republic of Buryatia, Russia. The state medal recognizes a significant creation of literary or artistic work for the Republic, and acknowledges Peter's evening of three ballets made for the Republic of Buryatia in 2011. This same program was performed at the new Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in October 2011.

A recipient of the Clifford E. Lee Award, Canada's national award for young choreographers, Peter has also been supported by grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Chalmers Foundation, and the Judy and Henny Jurriens Choreographic Fellowship.